I had lunch yesterday with a woman who grew up in Tampa and now lives in Miami Beach with her Portuguese husband whom she met in Brazil. They both have jobs they like, and a condo on the beach, but they’re planning to move next year to Portugal.
Toward the end of our lunch our waitress arrived, a woman with naturally silver hair, and said she had to leave us: her friend had just gone into labor and she needed to drive her husband to the hospital. She told us that we’d be in good hands with her colleague.
Her colleague was much younger. She presented us with the check, and asked if we had any exciting plans for the weekend. We didn’t, but my friend said that last weekend she had gone on a cruise.
“I would love to go on a cruise,” our waitress said. “But I’m scared to. I can’t swim.” She then went into a long monologue on her failure to learn how to swim due to her inability to understand “the physics” of swimming.
I love Portugal, and if I spoke Portuguese I might consider moving there myself. But I’d miss – as I’d miss everywhere in Europe, pretty much everywhere else in the world – hearing the personal stories of my waitresses.
